[jdom-interest] Outputting escaped entities in element text

Bradley S. Huffman hip at a.cs.okstate.edu
Thu Oct 3 08:43:09 PDT 2002


Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:

> At 9:23 PM -0500 10/2/02, Bradley S. Huffman wrote:
> >Here's a patch to XMLOutputter that does what you want.
> >
> >It leaves any substring matching "&#[0-9]+;" or "&#x[0-9a-fA-F]+;" in a
> >Attribute value or Text untouched. This may or may not be what most people
> >want, but now it's in the archive for those who wish to find and apply it :)
> >
> 
> Please don't apply this. This is simply wrong.

Hmmm, so char. references are no longer allowed in XML documents?

> It is completely contrary to the JDOM model, and mixes syntax with
> semantics in a very  damaging way.

Yes it's contrary to the model, that's why it should *NOT* be checked into
the CVS. But it is a solution to a specific problem that can be used today.

> Just put the characters you need in your Java strings and let XMLOutputter
> escape them as necessary.

Which the poster seems to have already tried with

    foo.setText("\u2014");

and found it does not work with the FOP he is using. If it is a bug in the
FOP the ideal solution would be for it's writers to fix the bug, but then again,
we don't live in an ideal world.

Brad



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